Posts by — Adam

Every year, thousands of new graduates flood in to the work force eyes wide-open, ready to program. Unfortunately, most of them have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. These inexperienced developers only know a life of coding in the structured environment of their schools and have no knowledge of what it’s like to develop in the real world.

Time and time again, I have seen the stark differences between developing a program in the school setting and one in the business setting and I’m going to share my thoughts with you today.
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Software projects fail. If you’ve worked with a company for long enough, I’m sure you have seen at least one project that didn’t make it to the release phase. There have been reports saying that as much as 31% of projects fail. But why do so many projects fail?

Today I’m going to look at things a little differently. Instead of telling you what you can do to prevent your project from failing, I’m going to tell you what you should do if you want your project to fail.
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Every single developer has at one point or another ran into a bug in their code. You can plan out your program, meticulously write it out, read over it, and in the end when you run it, you’ll inevitably find something that is wrong with it. The problem may be as simple as a syntax error or challenging such as a random segfault or semantic error. Whatever the problem is you’re bound to run into them from time to time. If you read on I’ll tell you five tips to improve your debugging techniques.
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“Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan”

If you’ve been programming for any length of time I’m sure at one time you’ve had the pleasure (or lack thereof) of wading through another persons code. It is definitely not a pleasurable journey when the code is new, written with the newest standards; but when the code is legacy it can be a downright hair-pulling experience.

The problem with a lot of code is that it isn’t written in a maintainable way. Now you may ask, what is “Maintainable Code”? Maintainable code is purely code that can easily be maintained throughout the years and on different platforms. If you asked 100 people that write code for a living you would probably get 100 different answers on how to write your own maintainable code. Below is a list of things that can help you make your code more maintainable.
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You have now learned how to write your first c program as well as the different loops in the c language so its now time to learn about functions. In general, functions are blocks of code that perform pre-defined commands to accomplish a certain task. You can either use the built-in functions included in the library or user defined functions (ones you create).
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If there is one thing that a programmer is constantly doing throughout their entire careers, it is improving their programming skills. The IT industry is one of the most rapidly growing sectors. If you don’t adapt to the new standards and practices you’ll quickly be left in the dust and replaced by newer, more flexible programmers.

The good thing about being a programmer, is that you already have strong skills in problem solving and learning things. This means that learning a new programming language or developing a new skill set shouldn’t be as hard as it would for someone who doesn’t have strong problem solving skills. That being said, learning new things can be a daunting task that can take a very long time. Here are a few tips for increasing your programming skills.
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I honestly can’t recall the number of times I’ve been asked about the differences between arrays and linked lists. There has been countless times when people have come up to me and asked “When should I use arrays and when should I use linked lists?” Since I’m getting tired of answering this so many times I felt I should write down my answer here
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If you want to repeat the same blocks of code over and over you have two choices. Copy and paste each block or you can use a loop. In C there are three different types of loops: for, while, and do…while. Each of them has their own specific uses and syntax, and below I’ll explain all three.
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One of the hardest concepts in the C programming language for me is Pointers. To this day I still often have to look in my text books when I’m diving deep into pointer world. Hopefully this tutorial will help demystify pointers for you.

What are Pointers?

Pointers get their name for one reason: they “point” to locations in memory. Pointers are just variables that store memory addresses, usually the addresses of other variables. With this memory address you’ll then be able to go to that address and retrieve the data stored in it. If you happen to have a large of data that you want to pass into a function it’s a lot easier to pass its location to the function than to copy every element of the data.
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The C programming language was first developed between 1969 and 1973 by a team from Bell Telephone Laboratories. Many of the principles and ideas used in this language were taken from the programming language named ‘B’ (created by Ken Thompson) as well as its ancestors BCPL and CPL (Combined Programming Language and Basic Combined Programming Language respectively). Dennis Ritchie was the main person responsible for converting the C language from B but there were many others that helped such as: Ken Thompson, Alan Snyder, Steven C. Johnson, and Michael Lesk.
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